Robey

TLDR: I made a small typescript-compiling front-end for the nodejs test runner: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@robey/gauntlet I’ve been on a quest to reduce dependencies in my nodejs projects, partly because of things like the left-pad incident and the de…

In the summer of 2021, I bought a Watchy: a hobbyist watch with a tiny (200x200 pixel, 4cm) e-ink screen, an ESP32 processor (plus separate real-time clock chip), 4 buttons, a step-counting accelerometer, and 200mAh battery.

I recently got CI working with my personal forgejo instance, and thought I would share how I did it.

Bizcat is a retro 8x16 bitmap font, intended for hobby computers or terminals that use a 640x480 graphics mode, like the Linux VGA console.

Background I started using Linux in the early 1990s, first as a toy, and gradually as my primary/only OS.

I’ve been reading more and more blog posts of the “please don’t interrupt me” variety, from yesterday’s post by Zach of Github about communicating over text back to Paul Graham’s essay on meetings to the under-appreciatied Peopleware (from 1987!).

Last time, I explained how adders work in CPUs, and one nice trick for speeding them up.

A few weeks ago, probably due to my recent Arduino and D-CPU obsessions, I started thinking about with this topic: How do modern computer CPUs add numbers?

Remember how annoying it was to try to get anything done in C++?

I recently picked up one of the new “retina” Macbooks, and it looks incredible.

When I first started playing with scala in 2008, I was dismayed by the state of server configuration in the java world.

I forget where I first read about this meme, but I’ve been appreciating it more and more over time: Once a programming pattern achieves widespread use, languages start to absorb it into their structure.

AT&T is a very large, very old company.

The latest MacOS release (10.6, or “Snow Leopard”) comes with a new monospace font.

Long ago, when making an SSH client for a phone, we needed the tiniest possible monospace font we could find that was still basically legible.

Git is really confusing for new users who have come over from subversion or perforce.

I bumped kestrel to version 1.2 this week and there are a few new features: Queue files are loaded at startup time now, before opening the listening port.

Dan Bornstein had a correction about my guesswork on how dx works, and I got permission to post it here.

Last night I got to give a short talk at SDForum on “solving real problems with actors”, or more specifically, why I got interested in using scala actors, how they’re used in naggati and kestrel, and what I learned about where they’re useful and not.

If you’re using (or have tried to use) kestrel 1.1, you should upgrade to 1.1.1 (in github) for a performance fix.

When Nick, Evan and I stumbled out of “Star Trek” at the Metreon last night, it was 1am.

In java 5 update 6, or 1.5.0_06, or whatever goofy release naming scheme they’re using now, there’s a cool replacement for jconsole called “visualvm”.

A few weeks ago, Jorge Ortiz gave a good talk at BASE about actors.

A story A few years ago, at Danger, I wrote an SSH client for the Hiptop (or Sidekick) phone, which we gave away to developers for free as a demonstration of our API and the cool things you could do with it.

Chris DiBona gave me a free G-phone after an open-source talk last week (thanks!)

I could not find this anywhere on google in one place, but I pieced it together from clues Steve found by poring over a half dozen other blogs.

Ever since we deployed scarling in production, its name has progressed from being a stale joke to an annoyance.

Some kind of bug was spreading around at work a few weeks ago and got me interested in alternate keyboard layouts again.

I just spent a long time tracking this down, and nobody else on google had ever reported a solution.

Apologies in advance.

Now that we’ve been using git at Twitter for a couple of months, we’ve overcome several crippling problems and misunderstandings about how to use it properly.

I have to get this rant off my chest.

I recently spent bits of my free time porting Starling to scala, and thought I’d post the story here in case anyone else finds it enlightening or interesting.

Why my recent infatuation with scala?